Public Speaking

In a eulogy for Caper Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld spoke with admiration of a sign that Weinberger kept in his office. It was a famous quotation from Winston Churchill.

Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in.

Tellingly, Rumsfeld left out the concluding part of the quotation "except to convictions of honor and good sense." If anything is missing from the Bush administration it is honor and good sense. No matter what mistake is made, they will not admit errors in judgment or learn from the result of most of their actions. Even Condoleezza Rice’s reference to thousands of tactical errors in Iraq is smothered by assertions that strategically no error was made.

During Rice’s trip to Iraq, with Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, Straw explained that the US and Britain had a right to participate in the decision-making process for the establishment of the new government. His rationale, about which Condi had no public disagreement, was that we had this right because over 2,000 of our soldiers had died in Iraq, 140,000 soldiers were in Iraq, and we have expended heavy financial resources.

Given the unilateral nature of the decision to invade Iraq this is as logical an argument as the one that says the best way to ‘support the troops’ is to keep them in harms way regardless of whether the decision to be there was right or not, or whether it is now.

Meanwhile on the President’s words contradict reality front, today’s Washington Post reports that we are cutting back funding in support of Iraqi democracy including projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society. This follows the ratcheting back of ambitions for reconstructing the country's battered infrastructure.